Bonner didn't sleep much that night. He settled the kids down, placing them close to the fire and wrapping them in the blankets that he and the Mean Brothers usually used. Then he sat between them on the hard ground, a huddled figure curled on either side of him, his back resting against the hard frame of his tough machine. The kids fell asleep almost as soon as they lay down although Bonner could sense their eyes on him, studying him in those few minutes between sleep and waking. They stared, their eyes glinting in the orange light as if to reassure themselves that he was really there, that he wasn't going to leave. Once they decided he was there and there for good, they slept.

It was the sound sleep of security and trust. They let sleep claim them because they knew that Bonner and his silent friends were a powerful bulwark against the horrors of the night and the world it enclosed in the black air. Their instinct told them that Bonner and the Mean Brothers would summon the Furies to protect them, that the three men would destroy all that tried to do them harm.

The Means slept too. Usually one of them would take first watch, awakening Bonner in the night to have him take his turn. But not tonight. They had seen that look on Bonner's face before. He would be awake for a long time. If he needed them all he had to do was wake them.

Usually the stem planes of Bonner's face were closed, granite hard, revealing none of his thoughts. But on nights like this, when he was unobserved by only his two mute partners, his graven features dissolved in the intensity of his thoughts and his face revealed that he was a troubled man.

He was not thinking of the road ahead of him. The Devils that had sliced up Almost Natural were not much on his mind. They were, for all intents and purposes, dead men; they breathed now but they were marked. The manner of their killing Bonner would leave to circumstance. Right now his mind strayed to the two children sleeping by his side. Where could they go? Where could he take them where they would be safe?

No one knew better than Bonner what kind of world it was. There was a law: the law of the gun. If law was sacred, then the gun was the holy relic. You lived, you died, the gun was always triumphant. Force had no conscience—it used men, rather than the other way around. Force, violence, blood, death, those were the wellsprings of the life of the new world. There was no safe place now. To live was to know that life could be taken from you at any moment for any reason by any man who cared to try. Where, Bonner wondered, was there a place for children in all this?

Ahead of him were miles of struggle and he knew he was equal to it. The Mean Brothers—hell, he thought, they would enjoy it. But two kids? How could they endure the horrors that were to come? But where could he leave them in safety? The last safe place on the continent had died a painful death five nights before. He would have to take them with him.

It was a terrible paradox: the safest place, and yet again, the most dangerous, was right by Bonner's side.

In the gray light of dawn the little camp awoke. The Means kicked the dying embers of the fire into something approaching a blaze. They managed to cook a sort of oatmeal from the course cereal they kept in a dirty sack. The mush was tasteless so they put a lot of salt in it—if there was no salt, gunpowder would do—but it was hot at least. It didn't taste like much and it didn't look too good but the warmth made everyone feel better on a damp morning.

Bonner woke the kids gently but Emily still opened her eyes with a start and a cry as if she expected to wake up to find that their rescue had been nothing but a dream.

The Mean Brothers slapped a pile of gray mush onto tin plates and handed them to the kids. Bobby and Emily eyed them curiously and seemed to eat more to avoid offending the Mean Brothers than out of hunger. Bonner remembered the breakfasts that Martha used to put out in the old days: eggs, butter, bread—real food for people who had worked hard to produce it. Bonner always felt guilty eating it. A meal at Martha and Charlie's table would have been the kind of fare that Bonner's fellow smugglers and riders would have killed over. The butter they forced him to slather onto his bread was worth a small fortune—but they gave it away.

The Mean Brothers broke camp, stowing the meager equipment under the seats of Bonner's car. The kids watched, apprehensively, like animals ready to run.

"Are you leaving?" said Bobby.

"We all are. You too," said Bonner.

Relief washed across the kids faces. "Where are we going?" asked Emily.

"We're going to look for your mom and dad."

"Great!" said Bobby.

Bonner squatted down next to them. "Look," he said, "there are some things you should know ... I want you to understand. Finding your folks is not going to be easy. You're going to see a lot of bad things."

"Fighting, you mean?" asked Bobby.

"Yeah. People are going to get hurt. But, you see, I can't figure out a where there's a safe place to put you."

"We want to come with you," said Emily, brushing a strand of hair from her eyes.

That settled it.

It was a tight squeeze in Bonner's car. Bobby and Emily sat in the laps of the Mean Brothers as if they were huge hairy armchairs. By the time the morning sun etched long shadows in the dew Bonner had put his small party on the road.

He continued to follow the Devils' tracks down the long dirt road until it joined up with a ribbon of old two-lane blacktop at the bottom of the mountain. The road curved away down the valley and without hesitation Bonner pushed his machine out onto it heading south. The tracks were gone, of course, but the Devils would have headed south. Bonner had no doubt there was a fork in the road somewhere up ahead and then he would have to make a decision as to which way they went. Right now, though, he was sure.

The road was littered with the rusty tattered wrecks of tractors and pickups. This had been farm country once. Bonner always made a point of reading the fading signs on the sides of the roads he traveled. The stores more or less made sense to him (Sam's Feed Lot) but others puzzled him (Bob's Big Boy). The large, taH, rectangular boards that didn't appear to be attached to any store or ruin of one that Bonner could see made less sense: FIFTY-FIVE: IT'S THE LAW. RISEN CH1RST IS KING. E-Z LISTENING. 104.2 KHJB CATLINBURG.

It seemed to be some sort of way that the men of the old world communicated with each other while they shot down their nice open roads. The significance of these monster signs was gone for good. When Bobby asked him about one—T.V. 28 BRINGS BACK THE GOOD OLD DAYS then followed by the word M*A*S*H—Bonner could only shrug. There was a lot about the old world he didn't know, things he would never know.

They flashed by a huge sixteen-wheel truck. It lay on its side, the rims of its wheels shorn of tires sticking straight up at the leaden sky. It looked like some enormous stiff dead animal. An angry tear in the rusty sides showed the cargo that the truck had carried once: inside were hundreds of crates crammed full of little skeletons. Chickens. The bones spilled out onto the road and they crunched under Bonner's fat tires.

In this new age, Bonner thought, that many chickens would have made a man rich for life. It would have also made him a target. He would have had to spend half his money and all of his time with his bodyguards—and there was no guarantee that they wouldn't try to knock him off one dark night. Getting yourself killed for chickens. That was the kind of world it was.

The kids stared around them, not quite able to believe what they saw.

"You never came down off the hill, did you?" yelled Bonner over the roar of the engine and the scream of the wind.

Bobby shook his head. "Dad said it was bad down here."

Dad was right, thought Bonner. He knew, of course, that this little corner of dead America was nothing, of course. Here the land had died because the country as a whole had died. Bonner could tell that the bombs had not rained down here bringing their terrible messages of death to this quiet land. But after the bomb places like this had just fallen apart. Perhaps they had fallen prey to fear and hate, when old tribal loathings had come to the surface and ancient scores were settled under the cover of being cut off and the chaos of the world outside. Maybe these little towns had just . . . died.

To the kids, it was a world they never knew existed. But Bonner knew they were in for worse shocks. He had seen places where the earth had been torn apart like old rags, where whole cities had been reduced to ash, where the streets were filled with broken glass as deep as snow after a blizzard. But Bobby and Emily had seen their own little piece of horror, worse really than the quiet tombs of the millions of dead, faceless strangers.

Later in the day they saw a touch more of the cruelty that men can work. Lying across the road was a body, a fresh one. Bonner slowed down and pulled up a few yards from the bloody mass.

"Stay here," he said quietly to the kids. He walked up to the corpse and saw that it was a woman. She was lying face down on the hard road surface. Her blond hair swirled out from her head and it was stiff with blood. You didn't have to be an expert to see that she had been beaten to death. Gently, as if she was still alive, Bonner turned her over. Crushed under her body was a tiny corpse of a baby, a complicated tangle of veins and flesh connecting it to his mother's body.

"Mrs. Conners," said Bobby's voice behind him. "She was going to have a baby. Mom said it could come any day. ..."

Bonner looked at the broken bodies below him and imagined what had happened. The woman had gone into labor on the road. The Devils had refused to stop. She collapsed. The baby was born dead. The woman was too weak to rise. They beat her to death. Usually, pregnant women were prized by slavers. They called them "two-fers." Two for the price of one. These Devils must be in a hurry.

Bobby and his sister looked at the dead woman and her child with that peculiarly distant look that comes into the eyes of those used to observing suffering. Bonner had seen the same look on the faces of riders and Stormers and slaves. He was amazed that the two kids had adopted that kind of reserve so quickly. They were learning—and a piece of them, their innocence, was dying.

A Mean Brother drifted up to Bonner's side. The man giant held his shovel in his hands. He held it inquiringly in front of him. Bonner often buried the victims of random violence he found along the road.

"Yeah," muttered Bonner. "Let's give her a decent burial."

The Mean Brother heard his order and wandered to the side of the road and began burrowing in the hard ground.

Bonner looked down the road. Another innocent person had died, two if you included the baby. Another bloodied corpse: it was a signpost pointing the way towards revenge.

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